⚱️ The Digitization of Deathcare with Faisal Abid

In this episode, we talk with Faisal Abid: Speaker, Entrepreneur, Google Developer Expert, and co-founder of Eirene cremations. Eirene provides high-quality, affordable cremation services. Eirene allows families to plan an affordable cremation entirely online or over the phone. Leveraging technology to help provide a better funeral experience to families. Additionally, Faisal walks us through the unique business and technology challenges he faced at the beginning of Eirene.

✨ Episode Sponsor

• Auth0: https://auth0.com
• Auth0 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/auth0
• Auth0 on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/auth0
• Auth0 Avocado Labs online meetup events: https://avocadolabs.dev/

🔗 Episode Links

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/FaisalAbid
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faisalabid/
• Eirene Cremations: Simple, Modern Cremation Services https://eirene.ca/
• Eirene LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eirene/
• Eirene Twitter: https://twitter.com/Eirene
• Hosts: 
  • Frederick Weiss: https://twitter.com/FrederickWeiss
  • Brian Hinton: https://twitter.com/mrbrianhinton

📜 Transcript

[00:00:40] Brian Hinton: Welcome to Thunder Nerds, I’m Brian Hinton.

[00:00:42] Frederick Weiss: And I am Frederick Weiss. And thank you so much for consuming the Thunder Nerds. A conversation with the people behind the technology that love what they do,

[00:00:53] Brian Hinton: and do tech, good.

[00:00:59] Frederick Weiss: And our sponsor Auth0 is helping us do tech good all year long.

[00:01:07] Brian Hinton: Yeah. We'd like to thank them again for sponsoring this season.

[00:01:10] Brian Hinton: They make it easy for developers to build a custom secure and standards based unified login by providing authentication and authorization as a service to try it out, go to Auth0.com. Auth0 is also on both YouTube and at the twitches under a username Auth0 and with some great developer resources and streams.

[00:01:35] Brian Hinton: Also, make sure to check out the avocado labs who doesn't love avocados? It's an online destination that their developer advocates run, organizing some great meetup events. And again, remember to check out Auth0.com.

[00:01:51] Frederick Weiss: Love it. Thank you so much, Brian. Really appreciate it. Yeah. And go ahead and start live chatting with us.

[00:01:56] Frederick Weiss: Now we'll answer your questions in the order they are received. Additionally, make sure that you subscribe to the show go to youtube.com/ThunderNerds. Click that notification bell for alerts on new videos. And we also have an exclusive subscriber giveaway. So please check that out. So yeah, please just do it.

[00:02:21] Frederick Weiss: So now with that being said, and without any ados being furthered, let's go ahead and welcome our guests. We have an amazing human being on the show. Joining us again for the, I don't know, the third, fifth, eighth time we have: speaker, entrepreneur, Google developer expert, Faisal Abid. Welcome to the show.

[00:02:48] Faisal Abid: Hello

[00:02:52] Faisal Abid: I think it is my fourth time?

[00:02:57] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. Maybe even more than that. I could think of when you first were on or show way back when you had shorter hair. And I don't think it took that long to grow about way back in 2018. Maybe we were at DevFest. 

[00:03:11] Faisal Abid: Yep, exactly. Yeah

[00:03:15] Frederick Weiss: Yeah. And we really appreciate you coming on the show and providing your insight and your knowledge every time it's it's always super fun and entertaining and we we love having you on with that being said, let's let's get to know you a little bit for the people that might not know you, can you just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do in general and in your own words?

[00:03:38] Faisal Abid: Yeah. I'm Faisal. What do I do? So I'm an engineer, entrepreneur. What I really do is I try to solve really hard problems. Sounds pretty vague, but right now, the problem that I'm solving is in the space of death which is Eirene cremations. And that's what I'm working on. Aside from that, I do Google cloud consulting AI machine learning, all sorts of stuff.

[00:04:02] Faisal Abid: So just have my hands in everything with a big focus on solving hard problems. Let me

[00:04:08] Frederick Weiss: ask you then, where are you where are you currently working? What's your actual maybe I shouldn't employ the word actual, huh? Employ a lot of connections there. What is your actual day job?

[00:04:20] Frederick Weiss: Your nine to five and what do you do there? What's your, what's your day to day? I guess my data would be I'm a juggler because what I really do most of my time is spent on Eirene. And that is. Understanding the product and like user UI, UX, product development, customer service, sales, marketing, like whatever.

[00:04:44] Faisal Abid: I am involved in that. And then outside of that I am now VP of engineering. So I'm shifted my role to focus internally at bootstraps. And that's where we do a lot of Google cloud consulting and working with clients, building out machine learning and ML ops and stuff.

[00:05:02] Frederick Weiss: So the people that know you probably think of you as more someone in a traditional sense of tech technology.

[00:05:10] Frederick Weiss: Now you're in this company, maybe you co-founded, it I'll let you explain in your own words, Eirene, which I believe is the Roman goddess of peace. Is that right?

[00:05:24] Faisal Abid: Yeah. It's the Greek goddess of peace. I believe. Yeah. Okay.

[00:05:29] Frederick Weiss: Let's close. I think, I hope I'm not offending anybody.

[00:05:31] Frederick Weiss: Excuse my geography. So let's first dive into this. So when, why, whom when you tell us about it, let's get the

[00:05:41] Faisal Abid: It is funny. You have a good point that a lot of people do know me. It's just like this tech person, but Eirene is far from a tech company inherently. It is a tech company it's using tech to solve a problem.

[00:05:51] Faisal Abid: My I'm going to give a long winded answer to this. So I think when I got into tech my history has been very interesting. I dropped out of school and just started this business when Andrew came out and I was trying to build like a Netflix for games, for Android. And so as I was going through.

[00:06:15] Faisal Abid: I just started to as well as I did that up and that didn't work out. I said, okay I guess I'm not for startups or whatever, I'm going to try something else. But I need to make money. So I went and joined a company called Kobo and Kobo was great because that really helped me understand how businesses work.

[00:06:35] Faisal Abid: I was 21 at that time. And so throughout my twenties, I worked at a lot of very interesting startups and something that started to change in my way of looking at it was at first, in my early twenties, I saw tech as a problem that needs to be solved. As I went through my twenties, I realized that there are a lot bigger problems than building image filters or random apps.

[00:07:04] Faisal Abid: There are a lot of bigger problems that aren't, that need to be solved, but they need to be solved using. But tech is not the solution, right? If that makes any sense. In the case of Eirene the problem for irenas families are when someone passes away, families are grieving, they're frustrated, they confused or scared.

[00:07:27] Faisal Abid: They don't know what's going on and they don't know what to do. Next. The solution isn't Eirene has a website, right? That is not solving the problem. It's the process that we take technology and the process that we put them through and the, how we enable technology to help solve their problem. That's the solution.

[00:07:48] Faisal Abid: And s